Edit Or Finish

A bit of writing advice I see floating around is “Never edit until you finish” which is one of those aphorisms that sometimes true, sometimes not. 

When it's offered in the context of “Don't edit and re edit and rewrite your first two pages ad infinitum, get on with the story” it's sound advice. 

When it's “Don't go back and do a quick fix when you realize you need to shore something up” not so sound. 

A lot hinges on one's work ethic, too.  

If you're the sort of person who gets easily distracted, yeah, maybe waiting until the first draft is done is a good idea. 

On the other hand, if you've demonstrated you can finish the work even with a distraction midway, you might save yourself a lot of agita by fixing problems early. 

It certainly doesn't hurt when you sit down to resume writing to reread the last chapter or couple of pages you wrote get back in the mood of the piece and when doing that reread to fix any typos / misspellings / grammatical errors you spot. 

With my current WIP I'm at the 80% mark just getting ready to start the home stretch.*  I'm 90K words in but realize I face some sequencing issues, i.e., certain characters know or do things before they should based on how the story unfolds. 

I also realized I added one wholly extraneous subplot just to introduce a character who won't be needed once I got the sequence straight so I paused my writing for a couple of days to tend to these issues plus whatever other little problems popped up during my review. 

From a purely pragmatic POV, fixing the problems now is far better than waiting until I'm done to address them. 

Not addressing them now runs the risk of writing future scenes that won't link up, requiring more effort to fix. 

Even if I don't compound the error, the amount of time spent fixing the problems remains the same.

© Buzz Dixon

*  (Actually by the time you read this I’m done)